One in four women in Ireland, according to Womens Aid Ireland, are subjected to domestic abuse. That was perhaps the most startling statistic in their report yesterday, which also reported that calls to their domestic abuse hotline rose again last year to another record high, with, the charity says, more than 34,000 women engaging their services to report, or seek support for, cases of domestic abuse.
The most obvious and simple explanation for the rise in domestic abuse cases is that it is not a rise at all in the instance of abuse, but a rise in the reporting of it. That is also the only explanation for the figures which does not call into question decades of Irish social policy, and the efficacy of all the money spent on “education programmes” and “awareness campaigns” about the rights of women and the evils of domestic violence.
The very best that can be said in light of these figures for those programmes, along with all the money the state sends to various charities and NGOs to combat the problem, is that they have raised the confidence of women who are abused to speak up and report what is happening to them. But that is not the purpose of the state spending money to combat abuse: The idea should be to reduce and eliminate domestic abuse, not highlight it.
The more disturbing possibility is, of course, that reporting rates have stayed roughly the same and actual instances of domestic abuse are on the increase. If so, then several decades worth of state policy have failed in their entirety, not that this will stop the state from simply reinforcing those failed policies with more of the same moving forward.
“There were a total of 33,990 disclosures of abuse against women and children, including 28,578 disclosures of domestic violence including coercive control against women.
A large majority – 20,851 – were emotional abuse, while there were 4,509 accounts of physical abuse, 2,290 economic abuse and 928 sexual abuse.”
The average person, I think, can understand what physical and sexual abuse is. The idea of economic abuse is not hard to understand either – controlling a woman’s finances, or taking money from her. Emotional abuse is in an entirely separate category, and is vastly more subjective than the other three categories. Yet it makes up more than two thirds of all the cases highlighted – a fact that the average reader of a news report on Women’s Aid’s annual report would have to read 15 or 16 paragraphs into a story to uncover.
When your correspondent went looking for a definition of emotional abuse, there didn’t seem to be a fixed definition. This is sort of indicative of the genre:
“I don’t want you going out with them. I trust you; I just don’t trust them.”
“You know you can’t get anyone better than me. You are lucky to be with me.”
“Are you sure you want to eat that? I’m just attracted to someone who takes care of themselves.”
“You’re so dumb. I knew this would be over your head.”
Do any of these sentences sound familiar? If so, you might be in an emotionally abusive relationship.
That the examples cited above are cruel and uncaring should be obvious – but it should also, I think, be reasonably obvious that there is a substantial gulf between the average person’s definition of domestic abuse and somebody telling their partner that they do not trust their partner’s friends. In every relationship, feelings do get hurt. Putting hurt feelings in the same rough category as physically beating somebody up seems, to this writer at least, to diminish and play down the seriousness of physical and sexual abuse.
It further seems obvious to me that emotional abuse – which self-evidently can be very real in some cases – is also so subjective, and encompasses such a wide range of potential situations, as to be a very hard thing to define. A husband who had a habit of making hurtful comments in anger, for example, is not the same as somebody who deliberately and strategically seeks to break down their partner’s self-confidence and esteem over a period of time. If unkindness starts getting categorised as abuse, then the abuse figures will only ever rise and the definition of abuse will only ever widen.
This is, of course, a boon to those NGOs who exist to tackle the problem of abuse: The more abuse they uncover, the more necessary their work becomes, and the more lavish their funding must be. In the meantime, the rest of us can, as in this case, end up with an entirely warped sense of the scale of the problem that they are being funded to address.